In the girls’ bathroom, I examined myself in the mirror. The backward stamp of my schedule was indeed on my right cheek. The soap was the rough, powdery kind you only ever find in schools. It was crap for cleaning. I had to basically rub my face raw to remove my schedule, and in the process of doing that, I smudged the part that was written on my hand.

When I finally got to physics the lights were off because the class was in the midst of watching a DVD: an introduction to subatomic particles and string theory. I handed Dr. Pillar my note, and he smiled and pointed me to a desk.

I took off my sunglasses and watched the movie. It was actually very relaxing. The narrator had one of those silky PBS type voices, and there was quite a bit of New Age and Philip Glass-y music to accompany the images, which were a combination of talking-head interviews featuring very nerdy adults in lab coats and short-sleeved polyester dress shirts, and computer simulations of stars and planets, forming and breaking apart and forming again. It was sort of beautiful. All those stars and planets, they reminded me of something…

Of being in an air-conditioned planetarium.

The air was stale like a library, but also sweaty like the sea…

Me in a flimsy white tank top.

With goose bumps on my arm.

Seventies rock.

A boy with sweaty hands.

This feeling…

Like anything might happen.

I wondered if this might be an actual memory, and if it was an actual memory, was it mine? Or was it something from a book I might have read or a movie I might have seen? Even when my brain had been perfectly functional, I had done that. Taken stories from books and sort of conflated them with actual events. Not lying exactly, though some might call it that. More like borrowing. It is hard to explain just what I mean unless you’re the type of person who does it, too.

I turned my attention back to the program. One of the physicists in the program was saying something about how when scientists first started studying the universe, it was like being in a room in the dark. But now with the new theories, they realized it wasn’t a room, but a house. Not any old house either, but a mansion with an infinite number of rooms to stumble through. I was imagining these scientists groping around in this darkened mansion. I don’t know why but I pictured the scientists as a group of drunken women, like they’d just come from a frat party. “Oh hey,” one would say to the other, “does anyone remember how in the hell we got in here in the first place?” They were still trying to get out when I fell asleep for the second time that morning.

Luckily, I woke up on my own this time, which was good. I didn’t want to be known as “that chick who’s always falling asleep in class.” (There’s always one; you know who you are.)

The doctors had said that head traumas can cause exhaustion for “a while.”

“How long is a while?” I asked.

“Ballpark?”

“Ballpark.”

They nodded and whispered to each other. “Indefinitely” was their very helpful reply.

“Miss Porter.” Dr. Pillar stopped me on the way out. He had a perfectly round face and was bald with a woolly strip of jet black hair above his ears and neck, like a pair of headphones that had slipped off his head. “Your papa. He calls to say that your math and science skills are hunky-dory, yes?” He had a strange, stilted way of forming sentences and an equally strange accent that I couldn’t quite place, but had a hint of Dracula in it.

“You are one year ahead in math and science, so this is very good, yes? But I prepare for you a dossier with chemistry and mathematics necessary for mastery of physics.” He handed me a large heavy envelope, crammed with papers.

In other words, a review. I thanked him. It was nice to know that the school was not peopled entirely with Mrs. Tarkingtons.

“It is interesting, this. Why you have lost some things and not others…” He studied me, much like you would expect a lab technician to watch an ape. “Maybe it is because you place different things in different areas of brain? We know nothing about brain, yes?”

It had certainly seemed that this was the case.

“And four years, is it? This is very odd. Maybe it is puberty onset that alters the place in which you are storing long-term memories? So you have everything before puberty, but nothing after?”

I wasn’t sure what he was trying to say, but I really did not want to discuss puberty with Dr. Pillar.

“Perhaps a traumatic event from your youth that you have been very much longing to repress?”

“Um…perhaps.”

“Forgive me. I like to make theories for what cannot be readily explained. It is my nature. Do you have any theories about your memory loss, Miss Porter?”

“I lost a coin toss and I fell down the stairs. Bad luck and clumsiness?”

“Or, perhaps, randomness and gravity. In this respect, you are walking physics experiment, yes?”

That was certainly one way to put it.

Fifth period was lunch, and Ace was waiting for me outside physics to lead me to our place in the cafeteria.

“You didn’t say you were coming today!” He hugged me and lifted my backpack from my shoulder.

“It’s fine, Ace. I can carry it myself.”

“I want to,” he insisted.

We sat with a group of about twenty kids at a long benchlike table. It was a mix of boys and girls, and I recognized some of them from my classes and a few others from elementary school. Our table was, by far, the noisiest one in the place. You could tell that the kids I ate with considered themselves to be the celebrities of the school. It was like they were putting on a show of having lunch as opposed to actually eating it.

A curly-haired blonde named Brianna introduced herself and then said, “I just want you to know how brave I think you are. What happened to you is so, so tragic. Isn’t she so brave?”

I didn’t feel at all brave. Even though her words were ostensibly addressed to me, she seemed to be talking to Ace or the table at large or the whole school.

She took my hand in hers. “It’s strange because you look like yourself, and yet you’re so different, Naomi.”

“Different how?” I asked.

Brianna didn’t answer. She had finished talking to me and was on to the next person.

Four or five of the people sitting nearest to me also introduced themselves. Some of the girls spoke too loudly, as if I were deaf. Others wouldn’t quite look me in the eye. And then everyone just resumed The Lunch Show and ignored me, which was fine. I figured out pretty early on that these were Ace’s friends, not mine. I wondered where James Larkin sat—I hadn’t seen him yet. Or Will.

“Does Will usually eat with us?” I asked Ace.

“Why would you want to know about that?”

His reaction surprised me. “Did I say something wrong?”

“No…I know Landsman’s your friend, but I just don’t get that little dude at all.” Ace shook his head. “He eats in the yearbook office. You sometimes eat there, too.”

In addition to being loud, the cafeteria was kept at near-arctic temperatures, as if the administration was afraid our food might start to spoil while we were in the process of eating it. I actually started to shiver. On the way in, I had noticed kids eating in the courtyard. I said to Ace, “It’s such a nice day, maybe we could eat outside?”

Before Ace could say anything, Brianna answered, “Um, I guess we could, but we always eat in here.” Then Brianna and a girl whose name I couldn’t remember giggled, like I had suggested we eat on Mars.

“It’s true,” Ace said with a shrug.

So I shivered through another ten minutes of lunch before telling him that I needed to get something from my locker.

“Do you want me to come with you?” Ace asked.

I shook my head and told him I was fine.

But I didn’t go to my locker. I was simply tired of being cold. I walked out into the courtyard, but fall was near and it felt even colder to me out there.

I wandered behind the school. On the boundary between the athletic fields and the rest of campus was a greenhouse.

I tried the door and found that it was unlocked. It seemed somewhat less cold in there so I sat on a cement bench, in front of what appeared to be a cruel experiment with sunflowers—seven of the plants were mostly dead, but one was thriving. I wondered what the live one was being fed, or if it had just been more of a survivor to begin with.

I was still contemplating that eighth sunflower when a familiar deep voice said, “You’re shivering.”

It was James. I decided not to turn around and look at him yet. I didn’t want to reveal how pleased I was to see him again, especially considering that he hadn’t visited me in the hospital or at home.

“Maybe a little,” I replied casually. “Is it cold in here, by the way? I have trouble telling.”

“Not to me,” James said, emerging from behind an orange tree with an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips. He placed the cigarette in his back pants pocket. “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t cold to you.” He took off his jacket, which was brown corduroy with a sheepskin collar, and handed it to me. “Here.”

I put the jacket on. It smelled like cigarettes and paint. “You smoke?”

“Now and then. Mainly to keep myself out of worse trouble.”

For additional warmth I slipped my hands into his jacket’s pockets. I could feel keys, a bottle of pills, a lighter, a pen, a few slips of paper.

“Suppose I should have cleared out my pockets before lending my jacket to a girl,” he said. “What’s in there anyway?”

I gave him my report.

“Nothing too controversial, right?”

Depends on what the pills are for, I thought. “Depends on what the keys are to,” I said.

He laughed at that. “My mom’s house. My car, which is, at the moment, in the shop.”

Distantly, I heard the bell ring.

“You’re still shivering,” James said. He loosened his tie and took off his dress shirt. He had a T-shirt underneath. “Put it on under the jacket. You’ll be warmer.”

“Won’t you get in trouble?” The dress code at Tom Purdue was pretty strict.

He said he had another shirt in his locker. His arms were slim and muscular, but not like a guy who worked out. I noticed a two-inch horizontal scar across his right wrist. I wasn’t sure, but it looked like the kind of mark you’d get from trying to off yourself. He saw me looking at it. He didn’t cover it up, but he didn’t choose to explain it either.

The bell rang again. “You’re going to be late,” he said.

I looked at my hand. Sixth period was French III in Room 1—, the number had gotten smudged during the course of my morning ablutions. I held out my hand for James to read. “You wouldn’t happen to know where this is, would you?”

He held my hand like a book. After he’d read it, he closed his hand around my palm and offered to take me himself.

I liked the way his hand felt over mine. It might have been my imagination but I thought I could still feel the faintest of scabs on his palm from where I’d grabbed him so hard three weeks ago.

He dropped my hand almost as soon as he grabbed it. When he spoke, his voice was hard and businesslike. “Come on. We’ll be late.”

I had barely kept up with him as he led me through the halls, but then, at the French classroom door, he lingered. I thought he might say something to me. All he wanted was his jacket. “My jacket,” he said, rather testily for a person who had been so quick to take it off in the first place. I removed the jacket and was about to take off his shirt, too, but he repeated the thing about having another. “You should really dress more warmly,” he said before rushing off without a single glance over his shoulder. I stood there, cold again, and feeling bad that I hadn’t had time to thank him for his help at the hospital.

I had forgotten nearly all of French, which actually made my French class unintentionally fascinating.

“Bonjour, Nadine,” said Mme Greenberg in New York–accented French.

One thing that had never been in question was my name. “Sorry,” I said, “My name is—”

“En français? Je m’appelle…”

“Je m’appelle Naomi. Uh…Non, Nadine. Nadine, non.”

“Ici, nous employons les noms français, Nadine.”

“Oui,” I said. Fine, if she wanted to call me Nadine, whatever. It sounded like the name of a comment dit-on? French prostitute, but whatever. En anglais, I asked the boy sitting behind me what in the hell she was talking about. Apparently, we had all been assigned French names, which struck me as incredibly idiotic. If I ever went to Paris, people weren’t going to all of a sudden start referring to me as Nadine.